A Noble Calling

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Anna Marie Schuh
July 12, 2024

Although unemployment has reached historically low levels, government and nonprofit job growth has accelerated. This creates significant difficulties for managers in the public sector who have to find and retain highly skilled employees. This challenge got me thinking about why people choose to work in the public sector.

 My own journey in the public sector began quite serendipitously. Because I grew up in a blue collar family that did not educate its daughters, I needed to find employment upon my high school graduation. Because the federal government badly needed clerical support at the time, they sent staff into high schools to test upcoming graduates with typing skills. Shortly after passing that test, I began to receive job notices from various federal agencies. Although the private sector paid better at the time, it was a lot easier for me, someone who had never held an office job before, to respond to the vacancies that that the federal government kept sending me.

Eventually, I obtained a BA in Sociology, an MA in Public Management and a PhD in Political Science. Upon receiving my undergraduate degree, I moved to a position as a human resource management professional in a federal agency. Still, before doing that I sought professional employment in the private sector and was only offered secretarial positions, despite the fact that I had a college degree. I took the government job because I could use the skills that I had acquired during my undergraduate degree. The importance of public service never crossed my mind until I was many years into my professional work.

In my case, my journey into public service was unplanned and my public service focus emerged slowly. However, in discussing the issue of entering public service with a recent graduate of our Master’s in Public Administration program (MPA), I heard a very different story. This individual is the son of public servants. So, he became aware of the important work done by government employees at a young age. His own journey has been focused on nonprofit organizations and how such organizations serve others. He entered the MPA program because of his interests in social causes, the mechanics of the policy process and bureaucracy.

While these two examples are very different, they do provide information helpful to public sector recruiters and managers. First, the kind of person who can be drawn into the public sector varies. In my case, I had no public service background and no focus on entering the public service. Our recent graduate was raised in a public service environment. His knowledge about the public sector world was well above the average person and from the beginning he had a public service focus. This suggests that recruiters can be successful in focusing on a broad range of people who might have varying reasons for accepting public employment.

Second, people need to know about government. My introduction to government was from taking a test at my high school. Given our graduate’s history, he focused on the public sector when he initiated his job search. However, the majority of graduates are more like me, someone that the public sector needs to educate about public employment. This can be done in a number of ways. For example, public sector organizations can partner with educational institutions to create student awareness through such things as internships, field trips to relevant public facilities or sponsorship of school activities in subject matter areas.

Third, people need to know that they can make a difference. Many young people are service-oriented and want to contribute to the greater good. At the same time, many young people are cynical about government. To hire and retain young people in the public sector, recruiters and managers need to connect the specific governmental work to the greater good.

Fourth, government, with its emphasis on merit and open access to job opportunities, has provided upward mobility for groups that often have been excluded in the private sector. For example, the National Advisory Council on Eliminating the Black-White Wealth Gap cites government employment as a path to the middle class for black workers. A recent McKinsey & Company study noted that female leaders are better represented in the public sector with 25 percent more top leaders and 17 percent more women on the top teams. Finally, twelve percent of current postal employees are immigrants, a traditional upward mobility path for new citizens. Traditionally excluded groups create a strong pool of potential recruits.

 The public sector will never make its employees wealthy. However, it can provide professional and personal satisfaction as well as social mobility. These are the attributes that recruiters should emphasize and managers can foster. As President George Herbert Walker Bush said, “Public service is a noble calling, and we need men and women of character to believe in their communities, in their states, and in their country.”

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Author: Anna Marie Schuh is currently an Associate Professor and the MPA Program Director at Roosevelt University in Chicago where she teaches political science and public administration. She retired from the federal government after 36 years. Her last federal assignment involved management of the Office of Personnel Management national oversight program. Email: [email protected]; X: profschuh. NOTE: Harris Penn, a recent Roosevelt MPA graduate, was a major contributor to this article.

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